Lógos Sokratikós

Bertrand Russell remembered a pun believers in Britain used to say:
What is the brain?
Never mind.
What is the mind?
Doesn't matter.
Charming. Witty. But just that.

A lot of neuroscience ink has been spilt on the subject, but we here can put it in simple words, as follows.

If you ingest certain amounts of alcohol, you get drunk. Yeah, sure, so what?
Well let me put it another way: If your material body ingests a certain level of alcohol, why does your immaterial "you" get drunk? Your "moral soul" is pretending to get immoral with 7 cans of beer?

Now, it's a classical procedure to perform certain "cuts" in the cerebral cortex to make certain psychiatric patients more docile. Then docility is in the body? Why send a soul to hell for indocility (Indocility, adj.: unwilling or indisposed to be taught or disciplined) when it is a behavior controlled by certain brain structures?

James T

This is a bit like a river and the landscape. The river is the water running, never the terrain. Change the terrain the river alters course to suit, but the river is still the river, not the terrain.

Lógos Sokratikós

It doesn't get much fun without a believer here to flog with logic! :devil3:

Dark Knight Bob

Everything i've learnt about the brain indicates to me that the mind is merely the sum total of the neurons self analysing areas of itself.

If this were not the case then you would be able to find out everthing from introspection as then the mind would be capable of being 'outside' the brain and thus be able to 'view' the whole system, which would be impossible. A system cannot use itself to analyze it's entirety.

Major things that you take for concious thought have been shown to be nothign but products of the brain through experiments with people suffering from brain injury.

People have lost the ability to recognise faces, the ability to control their emotions, feel like they're two different people when both lobes were seperated.

Also without memory then I cannot concieve of how it would be possible to be concious. Afterall everything that makes us what we are seems to come from learning, learning how to talk how to problem solve (i.e learning how to learn) and even babies have been shown to need to learn how to recognise faces from abstract shapes. Memory itself is a process of the brain and to me seems to be the key element for conciousness/mind. So whilst I cannot explain exactly how the brain works in it's entirety I can see that the general processes we consider to be 'mind' themselves can easily be altered or manipulated through interection with the brain itself.

fast

So, the brain is the "it" as a whole, and the mind is the activity of "it"

It's still it, pun intended, but I am getting the picture.

James T

A little like saying that everything is merely the sum of atoms.

Lógos Sokratikós

I insist... GIMME A BELIEVER TO FLOG WITH REASON!

:thumbs:

LeeBuhrul

To which I'd add:

Soul - That subset of the human mind that concerns and deals with questions of right and wrong and good and bad as pertains what benefits human existence and co-existence

James T

and which does not exist .

Dark Knight Bob

That's exactly it.

I'm saying the mind and brain are exactly the same thing and that to talk of the mind is merely a humanistic abstract term.